Fiction: Lost in the Pacific

[BOAT]

What about water and food? A small vessel just can’t store enough of either for months. Also, check out the Pacific High. No wind ever. Sailing from CA to Hawaii, you follow its outer perimeter. Same thing going back which is why it takes twice as long to get back to CA than getting to Hawaii from there. Fiction indeed, but the story isn’t very plausible. Maybe make the boat larger than 26 feet. OTOH read North to the Light. This guy sailed to the North Pole, got stranded in the ice but managed to survive for a year and get back home. True story.

Yup, this is all true. That's why I made the suggestion to make the read more plausible by using SUICIDE as the motivation for the trip.
Without some sort of set up or plot device it makes it hard to get him on location in the Pitcairn in such a small boat in the first place.

The first thing writers learn is that they are not actually drifting in a boat with tigers and donkeys, they are writing a book they hope to sell in the bookstore, thus you need a setup with zoo animals on a disaster at sea to get the whole idea of Pi on a boat with a tiger in the first place.

Life of Pi is a perfect example: Man stranded on a lifeboat with a tiger and a donkey. Now, THAT needs some set up even though the creatures are actually humans in real life (thus further re-establishing the storys tag: Man and Tiger in lifeboat).

The Martian is classic Robinson Crusoe but I could not enjoy the movie because of the blatant obvious Chinese propaganda that was just poorly dumped into the story. The author sold out on that one for the screenplay.

I have a little experience but I do not wish to dive into my past life so we will leave it as just 'good advice'.

[Herschel]

The only "lost in the Pacific" story I have read in recent memory is the incredibly true story of Louis Zamperini, a WWII aviator whose B-24 plane was hit and ditched in the Pacific south of Hawaii. The surviving crew were adrift for about 45 days and 2,000 miles in life rafts during which they endured starvation, wounds, strafing by a Japanese plane, shark attacks, and even death of fellow crew, finally washing up on, of all places, an atoll in the Marshall Islands occupied by the Japanese army. Upon which they became POW's for the duration of the war. The chapters about the drifting across the Pacific might be instructive for your purposes in terms of just the physical and mental demands they experienced. I can wholeheartedly recommend the whole book, however, because it chronicles how Louis endured his years as a POW, and more importantly, how he became a positive minded survivor that did a lot of good in his long life. The book that tells the story is Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand.

[Russ]

The only "lost in the Pacific" story I have read in recent memory is the incredibly true story of Louis Zamperini, a WWII aviator whose B-24 plane was hit and ditched in the Pacific south of Hawaii. The surviving crew were adrift for about 45 days and 2,000 miles in life rafts during which they endured starvation, wounds, strafing by a Japanese plane, shark attacks, and even death of fellow crew, finally washing up on, of all places, an atoll in the Marshall Islands occupied by the Japanese army. Upon which they became POW's for the duration of the war. The chapters about the drifting across the Pacific might be instructive for your purposes in terms of just the physical and mental demands they experienced. I can wholeheartedly recommend the whole book, however, because it chronicles how Louis endured his years as a POW, and more importantly, how he became a positive minded survivor that did a lot of good in his long life. The book that tells the story is Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand.

Of course the book is going to detail so much. They made it into a movie